OProfile is a powerful system-wide profiler for Linux. Read
more at http://oprofile.sf.net
OProfile 0.8.2 has been released. OProfile is still in alpha,
but has been proven stable for many users.
New features
------------
Support for PPC64 performance counters has been added. This
requires a recent 2.6 kernel.
Support for PPC e500 performance counters has been added. This
requires a recent 2.6 kernel.
Support for performance counters on several MIPS processors has
been added for 2.6 kernels.
The x86-64 2.4 OProfile port has been disabled, and will likely be
removed in the next release.
The existing OProfile GUI (oprof_start) may be removed in a future
release due to lack of TLC.
Bug fixes
---------
Meaningless statistics are no longer printed in oprofiled.log.
Kernel call-graph data across module/kernel boundaries now works as
intended (bug #971487).
opgprof now loads all call-graph files correctly.
Improvements in the symbol names displayed in the output have been made.
Removed non-functional --threshold from oparchive.
three non functional events has been removed for P4 processor, REPLAY_EVENT,
EXECUTION_EVENT and FRONT_END_EVENT.
Known problems
--------------
On IA-64, some firmware revisions cause problems with OProfile (bug #931883).
Power management on laptops can be incompatible with OProfile in 2.4 (bug #554927).
Many Alpha ev67 events do not work (bug #931875).
A few Pentium IV events do not work (bug #841099).
The pre-emptable kernel option is not supported in 2.4 (bug #478516).
nosmp is not supported in kernels before 2.4.10 (bug #463087).
For 2.2 kernels, the module must be compiled as the same user
that owns the kernel source tree.
With an AMD64 kernel, OProfile must be built in 64 bit mode due to lack
of kernel support.
Using separate debug files as found on Red Hat can give wrong results
for symbols outside of the .text section.
opstack gives strange output for binaries without symbols.